It didn’t take long for Great Britain to find out that a Liberal is a Liberal. Within one week George Osborne, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, is pondering 40-50% taxes on capital gains, up from the current 18% rate.

Here:

The move could double tax bills for hundreds of thousands of investors and has been denounced as “legalised theft”. There has been speculation that the changes may be backdated to stop a “fire sale” of second homes and other assets.

The Liberal Democrats also want the tax to kick in below the current starting level of a £10,100 profit on any investment income. A threshold of £2,000 has been suggested. Deloitte, the accountancy firm, has estimated that that would mean the number of investors forced to pay CGT each year quadrupling to about a million.

David Cameron has been warned that the decision to raise CGT would be particularly unwelcome for core Conservative supporters, who were unaware when they voted Tory that they would end up with a significant bill on their investments.

Middle-class families have complained that they are effectively paying the price for the Lib Dem proposal to reduce income tax for low earners, which was adopted as part of the coalition agreement between the two parties.

Mr Osborne insisted that the CGT increase was necessary in order to crack down on income tax avoidance, saying that there was an “enormous amount of income shifting”.

But critics pointed out that hundreds of thousands of ordinary investors would be dragged into paying the new rate as well as those seeking to dodge income tax.

These include middle-class families, who would also be hit by the coalition’s decision to strip them of child tax credits, and those frustrated by the ditching of the promise to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million.

Didn’t take long, did it? One of these days (hopefully sooner) the middle class will realize that the Liberals will say lie any way they can to get at the middle-class’ capital.